Not every superhero has the power to “leap tall buildings in a single bound” or “change the course of mighty rivers”. Some superheroes rely on their wits and an arsenal of gadgets in their utility belt. As a mere mortal Web Design Superhero, I also keep an array of tools close at hand when going into battle against the forces of bad web design.

1. Color Schemer Gallery

Developing a site’s color scheme is usually one of the early hurdles in a web design project. Color Schemer Gallery offers thousands of color schemes that can be downloaded and imported into the ColorSchemer application (Mac OS X/Windows). Visit the Site »

2. Type Tester

Type Tester allows you to see how any installed font will appear on the web. Since font presentation has subtle – but important – differences between Adobe Photoshop and the average web browser, being able to see how the browser will handle a font can influence the decision to use a particular font in a design. Visit the Site »

3. HTML Ipsum

A creation of Chris Coyier, HTML Ipsum provides “Lorem ipsum” greeking text in a variety of HTML markup (ie. paragraphs, unordered lists, etc.). Visit the Site »

4. Contact Forms Generator

Creating forms can be a major pain in a web designer’s backside. However, forms are critical for any website that needs to allow readers or customers to interact with the site owner. Contact Forms Generator, saves precious time by creating forms; including the PHP, ASP or even Perl code needed for sending emails from the site to the site owner’s mailbox. Visit the Site »

5. HTML Entity Character Lookup

Finally a real lifesaver for those web designers — ie. me — who can never remember the HTML entity for © or Ç. This amazing little web app allows you to type a common character — e, for example — and returns the HTML Entities that resemble it, such as É, ê and Σ. Visit the Site »

6. ConvertIcon!

A favicon isn’t pointless eye candy. A distinctive favicon can help readers recognize your site in a sea of bookmarks. ConvertIcon! makes it easy to convert an image into a ICO or PNG favicon. Visit the Site »

7. CSS Tidy

Even in this age of expanding broadband access, web designers must keep a keen eye on bloated file sizes. CSS Tidy optimizes your CSS code for faster loading pages and lower traffic costs. Visit the Site »

8. Pingdom Tools

Pingdom Tools shows how long it takes your website to load under various bandwidth conditions. It allows you to analyze how long each component of your site – from stylesheets, scripts and images – take to load. This breakdown is invaluable to a designer trying to find the bottlenecks in site load times. Visit the Site »

9. Are My Sites Up?

Another Chris Coyier creation for monitoring your site up time. The service is free for the first five sites and can alert you via email and/or SMS if one of your sites becomes unresponsive. Are My Sites Up? is a real lifesaver when you need to know if a site is down before your client does. Visit the Site »